NATASHA

sort of double-speak in his musical language, using one idiom to please his masters in the Kremlin and another to satisfy his own moral conscience as an artist and a citizen. Outwardly he spoke in a triumphant voice. Yet beneath the ritual sounds of Soviet rejoicing there was a softer, more melancholic voice - the carefully concealed voice of satire and dissent only audible to those who had felt the suffering his music expressed. These two voices are clearly audible in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony (the

composer's 'Socialist Realist' rejoinder to those who had attacked Lady Macbeth), which received a half-hour ovation of electrifying force when it was first performed in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonia in November 1937.¹⁴⁹ Beneath the endless fanfares trumpeting the triumph of the Soviet state in the finale, the audience had heard a distant echo of the funeral march from Mahler's First Symphony and, whether they recognized the march or not, they must have felt its sadness - for nearly everyone in that audience would have lost someone in the Terror of 1937 - and they responded to the music as a spiritual release.¹⁵⁰ The Seventh Symphony had the same overwhelming emotional effect.

For it to achieve its symbolic goal, it was vital for that symphony to be performed in Leningrad - a city which both Hitler and Stalin loathed. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated and the Radio Orchestra was the only remaining ensemble in the city. The first winter of the siege had reduced it to a mere fifteen players, so extra musicians had to be brought out of retirement or borrowed from the army defending Leningrad. The quality of playing was not high, but that hardly mattered when the symphony was finally performed in the bombed-out Great Hall of the Philharmonia on 9 August 1942. - the very day when Hitler had once planned to celebrate the fall of Leningrad with a lavish banquet at the Astoria Hotel. As the people of the city congregated in the hall, or gathered around loudspeakers to listen to the concert in the street, a turning point was reached. Ordinary citizens were brought together by music; they felt united by a sense of their city's spiritual strength, by a conviction that their city would be saved. The writer Alexander Rozen, who was present at the premiere, describes it as a kind of national catharsis:

Many people cried at the concert. Some people cried because that was the only way they could show their joy; others because they had lived through what the music was expressing with such force; others cried from grief for the people they had lost; or just because they were overcome with the emotion of being still alive.¹⁵¹

The war was a period of productivity and relative creative liberty for Russia's composers. Inspired by the struggle against Hitler's armies,

or perhaps relieved by the temporary relaxation of the Stalinist Terror, they responded to the crisis with a flood of new music. Symphonies and songs with upbeat martial tunes for the soldiers to march to were the genres in demand. There was a production line of music of this sort. The composer Aram Khachaturian recalled that in the first few days after the invasion by the German troops a sort of 'song headquarters' was set up at the Union of Composers in Moscow.¹⁵² But even serious composers felt compelled to respond to the call.

Prokofiev was particularly eager to prove his commitment to the national cause. After eighteen years of living in the West, he had returned to the Soviet Union at the height of the Great Terror, in 1936, when any foreign connections were regarded as a sign of potential treachery. Prokofiev appeared a foreigner. He had lived in New York, Paris, Hollywood, and had become comparatively wealthy from his compositions for the Ballets Russes, the theatre and the cinema. With his colourful and fashionable clothes, Prokofiev cut a shocking figure in the grey atmosphere of Moscow at that time. The pianist Sviatoslav Richter, then a student at the Conservatory, recalled him wearing 'checkered trousers with bright yellow shoes and a reddish-orange tie'.¹⁵³ Prokofiev's Spanish wife, Lina, whom he had brought to Moscow and had then abandoned for a student at the Literary Institute, was arrested as a foreigner in 1941, after she had refused to follow him and his new mistress when they left Moscow for the Caucasus.* Prokofiev was attacked as a 'formalist', and much of his more experimental music, like his score for Meyerhold's 1937 production of Pushkin's Boris Godunov, remained unperformed. What saved him, however, was his amazing talent for composing tunes. His Fifth Symphony (1944) was filled with expansive and heroic themes that perfectly expressed the spirit of the Soviet war effort. The huge scale of its register, with its thick bass colours and Borodin-esque harmonies, summoned up the grandeur of the Russian land. This same epic quality was to be found in War and Peace - an opera whose theme was obviously suggested by the striking parallels between Russia's war

* Sentenced to twenty years' hard labour in Siberia, Lina Prokofiev was released in 1 957. After many years of struggling for her rights as a widow she was finally allowed to return to the West in 1972. She died in London in 1989.

against Napoleon and the war against Hitler. The first version of the opera, composed in the autumn of 1941, paid as much attention to intimate love scenes as it did to battle scenes. But following criticism from the Soviet Arts Committee in 1942, Prokofiev was forced to compose several revised versions where, in direct contravention of Tolstoy's intentions, the heroic leadership and military genius of (the Stalin-like) Kutuzov was highlighted as the key to Russia's victory, and the heroic spirit of its peasant soldiers was emphasized in large choral set pieces with Russian folk motifs.¹⁵⁴

As he was working on the score of War and Peace Prokofiev was asked by Eisenstein to compose the music for his film Ivan the Terrible, released in 1944. Cinema was the perfect medium for Prokofiev. His ability to compose tunes to order and deliver them on time was phenomenal. For Prokofiev the cinema became a sort of Soviet version of the operatic tradition in which he had been schooled under Rimsky Korsakov at the Conservatory. It gave new inspiration to his classical symphonism, allowing him free rein once again to write big tunes for grand mises-en-scene. Prokofiev's collaboration with Eisenstein had begun in 1938, when, after the disaster of Bezbin Meadow, the film director was given one more chance to please Stalin with an epic history film, Alexander Nevsky (1938), about the prince of Novgorod who had defended Russia from the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century. Prokofiev was asked by Eisenstein to write the score for his first film in sound. Under the influence of Meyerhold, the two were moving at this time toward the idea of a synthesis of images and sound - an essentially Wagnerian conception which they would apply to opera as well as to film.*

This theatrical ideal lies at the heart of their conception of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. These two epic film dramas are essen-tially cinematic versions of the great nineteenth-century history operas. In Ivan, especially, the scenes are structured like an opera, and Proko-fiev's brilliant score would not be out of place in any opera house. The

* The two men worked together with Meyerhold on the production of Prokofiev's opera Setnyon Kotko in 1939. The next year, following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Eisenstein produced Die Walkure at the Bolshoi in Moscow. See further R. Bartlet, Wagner and Russia (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 271-81.

film opens with an overture whose stormy leitmotif is clearly borrowed from Wagner's Die Walkure. There are orchestrated arias and choral songs; liturgical chants; even, quite incongruously, a polonaise; and symphonic leitmotifs, or the sound of bells, which carry the emotions of the 'music drama', as Eisenstein describes it in a note outlining his new Wagnerian cinema. In the final colour scenes, where music, dance and drama are combined, there is even an attempt to reach a complete harmony of sound and colour, as Wagner had once dreamed.¹⁵⁵

For Eisenstein these films represented a volte-face in artistic principles: the avant-garde of the 1920s had tried to take the theatre out of cinema, and now here he was putting it back in. Montage was abandoned for a clear sequential exposition of the theme through the combined effect of images and sound. In Alexander Nevsky, for example, the central idea of the film, the emotive clash between the peaceful Russians and the Teutonic invaders, is conveyed by the programmatic music as much as by the visual imagery. Eisenstein re-cut the film to synchronize the visual with the tonal images. In the famous battle scene on ice he even shot the film to match the score.¹⁵⁶ Stalin was delighted with Alexander Nevsky. Its emotional power was perfectly harnessed to the propaganda message of heroic leadership and patriotic unity which the Soviet regime needed to boost national morale on the outbreak of war. Indeed, the subject of the film had such an obvious parallel with the Nazi threat that its screening was postponed following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.

Stalin saw Ivan the Terrible as a medieval prototype of his own statesmanship. In 1941, as Soviet Russia went to war, it seemed a good moment to remind the nation of the lessons Stalin drew from Ivan's reign: that force, even cruelty, were needed to unite the state and drive the foreigners and traitors from the land. The official cult of Ivan